A New Modeling Approach for Bubble Growth in Foamy Oil

Abstract Some of the heavy oil reservoirs show high primary recovery and high flow rate under solution gas drive. The foamy oil theory has been proposed for the anomalous behavior. There have been numerous studies of diffusion-induced growth or collapse of bubbles in a fluid. However, there are some limits about them such as the determination of initial bubbles radius. Pointed to the problem that how to determine the initial bubble radius, this article proposes a new method base on the hydrodynamic equation, and then regards the bubble as a production well with source and sink theory based on the similarity between the bubbles concentration distribution and the pressure distribution of production well. According to the model established, the bubble growth by pressure and time is predicted, that is, how the amount and size of bubbles change during solution-gas drive is presented, which provided the guidance to determine the parameters of foamy oil due to bubbles change, such as foamy oil viscosity, compres...